The Metropolitan Transportation Commission adopted Plan Bay Area 2050+ Wednesday and certified its environmental impact report, giving final approval to the region’s long-range blueprint for transportation, housing, economic resiliency and environmental sustainability.

The plan was approved unanimously last week by the Association of Bay Area Governments’ Executive Board, concluding a nearly three-year planning process that included input from more than 17,600 residents, community organizations, advocacy groups and public agencies.

The cover of the Plan Bay Area 2050+ report, which was adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission on Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (Plan Bay Area 2050+)

Plan Bay Area 2050+ outlines 35 strategies across transportation, housing, the economy and the environment and is intended to make the nine-county region more affordable, connected and resilient through 2050 and beyond.

The plan emphasizes expanding affordable housing, improving equity in the reach of public transit, and addressing climate risks such as wildfires and rising sea levels.

For the first time, the plan includes a regional resilience project list. It is an inventory of infrastructure projects needed to prepare the region for roughly 4.9 feet of sea level rise in coming decades.

Michael Germeraad, associate planner with ABAG, said many of the projects on the resiliency list are conceptual in nature.

“It’s meant to give the region a tool to understand the level of funding that’s needed to meet this challenge,” Germeraad said. “Our approach is allowing locals or asset managers to lead an adaptation planning … as opposed to us coming in at the regional level and suggesting a specific approach.”

ABAG is the council of governments and the regional planning agency for the Bay Area’s nine counties and 101 cities and towns, and the MTC is the transportation planning and financing agency for the same area. The two agencies are required by the state to develop the regional plan jointly.

The Final Plan Bay Area 2050+ and the Environmental Impact Report can both be found online.

Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.